Borderliners Read Free Page A

ever get one. At first, because
there was no one to give it to me; later on I never felt like having one.
    I have read that they have never made a timepiece that is absolutely
precise. No disrespect to science, but no completely accurate time piece has ever been made.
    In the course of this century,
they discovered that the movements of the heavenly bodies were not, as they had previously
believed, constant. That
the course of the earth's orbit around the sun varied from year to year.

So they had to select one
particular year to provide them with a starting point at least. They selected
the year 1900. In 1956 the unit of time was redefined so that one second
equaled 1/31556925.9747 of the tropical year 1900.
    Unfortunately, that year will
never come around again. The earth will never again move precisely as it did in that year,
because of earthquakes
and other irregularities that have affected its course. This makes it hard to
synchronize the world's timepieces. It is hard to set a watch by an event that took place in the
previous century.
    Which is why, in 1967, they supplemented this definition
with atomic time, in which a second
corresponds to 9,192,631,770 ra diation periods
of a particular cesium-133 transition in what they call a cesium clock. Fredhøj   told us about it in physics. Now there were two methods of dating accurately, he said, the one supple mented the other.
    Later I read that, unfortunately, these two systems are
always out of step with each other, except for just after they have been syn chronized, which therefore has to
be done continually.
    Not to be petty. The most precise atomic timepieces they
have constructed so far have shown a
day-to-day variation of less than 10 -8 , which would , over 300,000 years, show up as an error
of no more than one second. No one
can deny that it is extremely accurate. Everyone has done their best.
    But it is not
absolutely precise.
    It would not have mattered so much if they had not made
such a point of this thing about time.
    Not
that it was ever talked about. Never. Humlum and
Katarina were the first people I heard talk
about time. But it was at the root of everything. It screwed life down. Like
some kind of tool.
    It was not just the classes and
assembly that began on the dot. There was also a study period and the meals and the
chores and voluntary sports and
lights-out and when you had to get up if you were
to manage a proper wash, and what time every third week the green
vitamin pills for the next three weeks were dished out, and what time on Sunday evenings you had to report
back to Flakkedam

after weekends at home. It had all been allotted a stroke of
the clock that was
most scrupulously observed. The inaccuracy amounted to less than plus or minus two minutes.
    No explanation of time was ever given. But one knew that
it was enormous, bigger than anything
mortal or earthly. That one had to be on
time was not just out of consideration for one's schoolmates and oneself and the school. It was also for the
sake of time itself. For God.
    For God's sake.
    There had always been a lot of
praying and singing. But we had never
tried to get through to God himself. For that he had always been too close to Biehl or the rector at the
Orphanage or the su perintendent at
Himmelbjerg House. Far too close to let us pray.
    To pray is to confess something,
to admit that one needs help. We were afraid that any confession, even to God, could worsen our situation and be used against us.
    Grundtvig
had written that the day was created for action and the twilight for rest, and that one should, therefore, be precise.
    When time itself was so exact, then so ought people to be, that was
the idea. Accuracy was a characteristic, and perhaps the most important one, of the universe.
At assembly one had to be abso lutely precise and absolutely still. Utter time and utter stillness.
That was the goal.
Achievement was there to bring us nearer to that goal. And to encourage achievement,
there was